[QUOTE=Dumbguy]
[QUOTE=guizot]
I’ve always wondered about that. It seems to me that Kennedy wasn’t as great a president as everyone seems to think. I think his greatest moment was the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Beyond that, I haven’t read that much to say otherwise. As for the civil rights campaign, didn’t he just hoist that off on Johnson?
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“I almost destroyed the world but managed not to” never seemed like such a great resume item to me, especiial considering that the Bay of Pigs cockup led to the Cuban Missile Crisis in the first place. Plus, I think McNamara saved his bacon.
[/QUOTE]
In fact, it was gross misunderstanding and fantastic miscalculation by Kennedy (and also by Khrushchev) that led to the unnecessary public faceoff of the Cuban Missile Crisis and subsequent fall from power of the latter. Khrushchev needed to be able to demonstrate to hardline military leaders that he could stand up to the West and get the genuine threat of Jupiter IRBMs out of Europe. He elected to do so by placing missiles in Cuba and negotiating a common withdrawal by both parties, each of whom could claim to have “won” with no one losing face. Unfortunately, the US got early wind of the emplacement from KGB Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, including layouts of missile emplacements which were then seen in imagery from U-2 overflights in Cuba. The US took this to be a direct threat and precursor to encirclement, rather than what it was; a gambit by the Soviet Union and a desire by Castro to gain military stability and legitimacy following the foiled Bay of Pigs Invasion. The really utterly stupid thing about this is that a) the Jupiters in Turkey and Greece were obsolescent and soon to be replaced by Atlas and Titan ICBMs anyway, so withdrawal (which the use did about 18 months later) was going to happen anyway, b) Khrushchev was legitimately a reformer, and had he remained in office (and his economic and political reforms been effective) it likely would have softened if not ended the Cold War, and c) in the end this just encouraged greater proliferation rather than serving as the basis for further negotiations in arms reduction, which instead had to wait until the late 'Sixties.
McNamara is not responsible, by the way, for defusing the CMC, a point even he makes clear in his book covering the incident and Errol Morris’ documentary, The Fog of War. It was, according to Mac, former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, minor Cabinet member to Kennedy, and personal friend of Khrushchev Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson who encouraged Kennedy to respond “softly” to a more conciliatory message from Khrushchev rather than the harsher demands clearly being dictated by Kremlin hardliners.
[QUOTE=ralph124c]
JF Kennedy was one of the worst-he was personally attractive, but a total disaster as president. His biggest failing: his inability to understand the weakness of the USSR. Instead, he got the US involved in war (Vietnam) that ultimately cost 60,000 American lives, 800 billion $, and resulted in disaster. Other than that, he didn’t do much (he made good speeches).
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To be fair, Kennedy was following the policy established by the previous Eisenhower administration, and during his tenure involvement was limited to ostensible advisement and some economic support to Diem. With the execution of Diem, that sort of involvement became untenable. According to McNamara (although the correspondence doesn’t conclusively establish this one way or another) Kennedy wished to limit involvement and would have pulled out of Viet Nam in the '64-'65 timeframe. It was under Johnson–whose virulent anti-Communist fervor and blind adherence to the “domino theory” made him unwilling to listen to both Cabinet and military advisors who recommended limiting involvement and maintaining an exit strategy–that the massive buildup and commitment, and later mass attrocities of carpet bombing and deforestation, occurred.
Reagan gets a lot more credit, and got away with a lot more failures with reputation unscathed, than deserved. However, although the specific events of Iran-Contra Affair occurred during Reagan’s tenure, the underlying mechanisms–the private intelligence service funded by drug and arms sales, the transfer of weapons and tacit support for despotic regimes in Southeast and Central Asia, Saharan Africa, and Latin and South American, the undermining of American domestic politics, money laundering for organizations which would later become known as supporting terrorism, and basically alienating the hell out of everyone–were in motion long before Reagan was elected President. Reagan and the people backing him certainly utilized and fed this apparatus (in opposition to Carter’s attempt to destroy it and in turn destroyed by it) but they only continued existing policy that had been going on since the inception of American non-military intelligence and the beginning of the Cold War.
I think Clinton slicked his way through things as well, coming out looking very accomplished while accomplishing very little. Even his impeachment ultimately helped him, being (rightly) perceived as partisan, petty, and pointless and rehabilitating an otherwise indistinguished administration plagued by utter incompetence in foreign affairs and failures of major domestic policy implementations. It didn’t hurt that he served during the largest economic boom of the 20th Century, despite the fact that (Al Gore’s singlehanded construction of the Internet aside) the Clinton Administration really had very little to do with the growth.
With regard to the o.p.'s assertion, I can’t see where Truman comes off as being especially successful. He failed to forestall the events leading to the Cold War (which may have been inevitable), the involvement in Korea was, if not an outright disaster, a quagmire which started the trend of U.S. involvement in Asian conflict without insight as to the underlying cultural issues, and he seems to have been generally ignorant on a wide range of things. His successor, Eisenhower, generally gets intermediate marks in history, but in many ways was clearly one of the most effective administrators in the Cold War era. Even his policies that I disagree with were well thought out in their implications and effects, and in general his tenure was noted for a reduction in international tensions and moderation, something his successors utterly failed to do.
Stranger